Suddenly, on computer screens on both sides of the Atlantic, alarms sound, alerting customs authorities in Europe and the United States that container security on the Lyria has been breached. Delicate sensors inside a container might have detected radioactive material A container seal may have been broken, triggering an alert system that immediately sent a cry for help across an ocean. It might be terrorists trying to plant enriched uranium inside a legitimate shipment. Or it may be a false alarm. Either way, authorities from an international assembly of law enforcement organizations have already swung into action, and the Lyria isn't moving another nautical mile until the situation is resolved.

The technology that might someday make a scenario like this possible is still on the drawing boards, but leaders at the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and officials at other agencies engaged in anti-terrorism efforts appear confident that this is where initiatives like the Container Security Initiative (CSI) post-9/11 may be leading - to the construction of sophisticated technologies able to detect a breach of container security at any point in the shipping process.

CBP Commissioner Robert C. Bonner believes these future technologies are critical tools in the effort to guarantee container security, but he also knows technology is only one part of the multi-layered approach he advocated and implemented soon after 9/11. The Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, or C-TPAT, is built on the notion that a flexible package of responses, as opposed to a single strategy, is the best remedy to one of the most complex problems America and its trading partners have ever faced: how to guarantee the integrity of the millions of cargo containers that flood U.S. ports every year, containers that are vulnerable to tampering from the moment the cargo is loaded at some foreign location to the moment it is unloaded on U.S. soil.

War games illustrate challenge
The challenge is huge. After 9/11, a team of experts from the government and industry were asked to participate in war-games that began with a presupposition that terrorists were attempting to smuggle a dirty bomb into the U.S. via commercial cargo off loaded at a U.S. port. As assiduous as their efforts to identify and preempt the threat were, the team was still dismayed when the "dirty bomb" exploded in Chicago.

The lesson learned from that exercise is one that anybody who works in international trade facilitation understands only too well - multiply the number of commercial carriers entering U.S. ports every day by the number of opportunities to violate any one of these containers at various, indeterminate points in the shipping process, and what you get is more than a billion chances that death may ride into the U.S., not on Revelation's pale horse, but in a shipment of lawn chairs or a crate of bananas.

The multi-layered strategy Commissioner Bonner and his team have devised is built on the realization that the shipping process involves countless, discrete processes implemented at unpredictable times and in changing circumstances. Factor in an untold number of random occurrences, human error and the vagaries of time and tide, and it's clear that there is no static, one-size-fits-all solution to terrorist infiltration.

"Smarter not harder" may be a cliché, but Commissioner Bonner believes it's the only way to fight this particular battle and win - by bringing not one or two, but an arsenal of weapons to the field. The tactic involves laying down a continuous "field of fire," exposing would-be terrorists to unrelenting scrutiny and unpredictable deterrents at every step in the shipping process. Every vessel, aircraft, and truck is driven through a series of successive intelligence "nets," each one designed to trap data or evidence the others may not have not been able to capture.

C-TPAT, a new 24-Hour Rule, innovative container security options, better intelligence and intelligence sharing, new data collection and coordination, technology, and sophisticated screening technologies designed to detect even the most minute amounts of dangerous substances constitute significant hurdles for even the most determined terrorist. Now that CBP inspectors stationed in foreign ports have extended the nation's defensive perimeter even further, the odds against terrorists exporting catastrophe form one of the world's 18 major ports have risen as well.

CSI-Le Havre: the first line of defense
The French port of Le Havre is in Normandy, about 40 minutes from Omaha Beach, and the proximity of the CSI office to the place where so many young Americans died in defense of freedom strikes a chord for Senior Special Agenct Joseph Pieretti, CSI team leader in Le Havre. Each of the four CBP officers currently stationed in Normandy volunteered for the mission, and while each had his or her own motives for taking on the demanding duty, all of them felt that this was an opportunity to play a central role in an undertaking larger and more important than any they had yet encountered.

"The entire CSI team, both U.S. and French," says Pieretti, "has displayed extraordinary poise, discipline, and fortitude in this new campaign in the war on terrorism. Since 9/11, vigilance has become our major watchword. More than half a century ago, Normandy was the beachhead for the defense of democracy. Once again, the U.S. and its allies are preparing for another D-Day, but this time the offensive will be waged against global terrorism. The Container Security Initiative team at Le Havre is fighting on the frontlines, and I believe history will record this struggle and our victory as certainly as it did the battle fought here on June 6, 1944."

The work that Pieretti and his CSI team are doing in Le Havre is being repeated at other major seaports around the world. The mission is a simple but critical one: to manipulate millions of bytes of data per day in ways this complex aggregate of numbers and facts has never before been manipulated. The office may not look like a war room, but it is. Computers, fax machines, pagers, printers, and maps studded with color-coded stickpins fill the small room located in a complex set back from the from the docks and shipping lanes a mile or more away. From morning until night, streams of data flow across six computer screens, information downloaded from bills of lading, manifests, intelligence data banks, and repositories belonging to agencies and organizations whose work is off-limits to everyone but a handful of insiders and these CSI "targeters."

The CBP targeters at Le Havre are Blondell Hayes, a supervisory inspector from Charleston, S.C., and Paul McCarthy, an inspector who came to Le Havre from Texas. As members of a CSI team stationed overseas, Hayes and McCarthy are back to hands-on work, splicing and dicing electronic bytes with a dexterity learned from years of experience in the field.

Back in the States, where Hayes works as a chief inspector, her mission was to target imports, and to detect and interdict illegal drugs and other contraband that may have found its way onto U.S. soil via legitimate cargo. Inspector Paul McCarthy handled cargo coming into the port of Houston, Tex., and his job, like Hayes', was to protect America's communities from cargo-borne parasites like cocaine, marijuana, and Ecstasy, as well as from the wide assortment of illegal commercial products that unscrupulous exporters routinely try to smuggle into the country in violation of U.S. trade laws.

Higher stakes
The game at Le Havre is a different one, with higher stakes than Hayes and McCarthy have ever played before, and they know it. For years, Customs has styled itself "America's Frontline," but here, an ocean away from U.S. borders, the CSI team understands that they are working on a frontier where a single misstep may change history.

In Le Havre, Hayes and McCarthy are focusing on exports to the U.S., scrutinizing information for hints that the kind of nightmare scenario they fear the most - a cache of enriched uranium or plutonium inside a container - is in the making. The team works closely with their French counterparts, targeters from a special CELTIC team whose daily schedule and responsibilities mirror the work the U.S. team has undertaken.

When a U.S. targeter alerts to an "anomaly" in the data stream moving across the face of his or her monitor, the word goes out to Joe Pieretti, the CSI team leader and to Michael Hart, the fourth member of the U.S. team. Hart says his job is "to add value" to the work the CSI targeters are doing, and with his background as a senior research analyst with years of experience in the "Sit Room" at CBP Headquarters in Washington, DC, Hart is clearly understating his qualifications.

The hand-off from the targeters to Pieretti and Hart also means the team's counterparts from the French CELTIC Unit are alerted. Like their U.S. counterparts, CELTIC targeters focused on imports before the construction of CSI. Today, the CELTIC team includes two additional members tasked with inspecting exports who work with U.S. targeters using their own technology to leverage the tools available to the U.S. team and drawing on a wide array of intelligence sources in Europe and Asia. The CELTIC team depends on an initiative called Vigilance, an effort that recently proved its worth when information from the French team ended with authorities in London seizing a supply of a deadly toxin called ricin - a poisonous substance 6,000 times stronger than cyanide and clear evidence that terrorist cells were alive and well in the UK.

When a CSI targeter in Le Havre detects an anomaly - when the systems register a "hit" - the U.S. team and its partners from CELTIC make a rapid assessment. If they agree further inspection is warranted, the chief inspector of French customs orders a team of her inspectors to conduct a physical examination of the container.

While the CSI team looks on, French inspectors run the container through an x-ray "truck" 40 feet long, a device similar to the technology CBP inspectors uses in the States. The x-ray equipment measures density; inspectors are looking for false compartments and internal measurements that don't conform with weights and descriptions listed in the shipping documents.

If authorities are still not satisfied that everything is in order, they may open the container and physically inspect its contents. Since the CSI team arrived in-country on November 30, 2002, they estimate they've witnessed about twenty of these container examinations. None of them, says Pieretti with undisguised relief, has led to the discovery of a bomb or radioactive components.

Formula for success
The U.S. effort to identify and seize weapons of mass destruction or their component parts before they depart a foreign port depends on a lot of things going right. The CSI teams from CBP must be composed of men and women with exceptional targeting expertise and years of experience - talents the team at Le Havre clearly possess. There must be a close rapport between the CSI teams and their foreign counterparts. Michael Hart, the senior intelligence analyst whose mission is to support the CSI targeters in Le Havre, says the "cooperation the French customs service has given the team goes far beyond what any of them could have anticipated." All four members of the U.S. team, in fact, are unanimous in their praise for the CELTIC unit and the French inspectors.

"No matter what happens on the geo-political scale," says Hart, "the openness and comraderie of our French partners are unequivocal. As soon as we arrived in Le Havre, they opened their hearts and their homes to us. On the job, they go the distance for the U.S. team; they use their own systems without hesitation to supplement the information we have. They are as committed as we are to preventing the export of weapons of mass destruction to the U.S., and the important thing is that you know their commitment is personal and real. September 11 wasn't just something that affected Americans. Every country around the world, including France, lost innocent citizens in the attack, and the people we're working with in Le Havre are in this fight with us 100 percent."

Finally, for CSI to work, there also has to be an adequate outlay of funds and other resources. Radiation pagers are small devices inspectors wear on their belts as they patrol ports and inspect cargo entering those ports. More pagers have been ordered and will soon be distributed to all CBP inspectors in the U.S. Plans are in the works to provide pagers to CSI members and their foreign counterparts as well. The devices cost $1,300 a piece and are highly sensitive to the presence of radioactive materials - an expert inside CBP says that the device alerts inspectors to the presence of colleagues or travelers who may have recently undergone radiation therapy. The pagers can also pick up the presence of "really hot material" from a distance of 2,000 to 3,000 feet.

Radiation portals are proven investments as well. These are large fiberglass panels, approximately four feet by eight feet, are able to detect radiation as trucks drive past. Inspectors using the panels pull suspect vehicles aside and use another rod-shaped instrument called a RIID, a Radiation Identification Inspection Device, to examine the truck more thoroughly.

The resources available to CSI teams working overseas are supplemented by systems and equipment in use by their foreign hosts. In many cases, when systems and technology prove complementary, it makes for a winning combination. But whether foreign customs administrations use equipment similar to the technology employed in the United States is a decision that belongs, not to CSI or CBP, but to our partners overseas. Border and Transportation Security (BTS) officials support working with foreign customs administrations to help them upgrade technology that may not be as current as U.S. equipment.

Pushing U.S. borders outward
CSI is a critical component of the multi-layered approach advocated by BTS officials and the Department of Homeland Security, an effort anti-terrorism experts in the U.S. say is essential if we are to prevent another attack on U.S. soil. CSI's success is also testimony to the willingness of our allies overseas to cooperate with that effort, and to provide substantive, meaningful support to the U.S. teams. So far, CSI teams are in place at 13 of the world's largest foreign ports. From all reports, the concept and its implementation have been embraced by customs authorities not only in France, but also in Canada, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, the U.K., Japan, China, Italy, Malaysia, Sweden and Korea.

And there's also a growing list of other nations who understand that supporting CSI translates into good business as well as good will, and trade industry insiders predict that, before long, this second tier of countries will be hosting CSI teams. CSI is welcome news for foreign exporters as well - shipments that pass muster overseas often receive expeditious processing once they reach the U.S., and CBP is quick to recognize exporters who build a record of cooperation and support as valuable partners in the war on terrorism.

Commissioner Bonner is confident that all 20 of the world's major seaports will soon be participating in CSI. When it happens, CSI teams will have access to 70 percent of all the containers bound for the U.S. - a huge step forward. Right now, CSI teams across the world are just happy to be making a difference. But they aren't doing it alone. Word continues to filter back that the customs administrations of host countries are doing their part as well, reaching out to U.S. teams overseas and offering one-on-one support to Americans far away from home, far from the familiar borders that, before September 11th, marked the edges of what seemed to be a safer and smaller world.

CSI is an initiative that was developed by U.S. Customs, now Customs and Border Protection, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Now located in the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is continuing to implement CSI at major ports around the world. Under the CSI program, a small number of CBP officers are deployed to work with host nation counterparts to target high-risk cargo containers. Its purpose is to protect containerized shipping from exploitation by terrorists. Containerized shipping is a critical component of global trade because most of the international trade moves or is transported in cargo containers. To date, 18 of the top 20 ports have agreed to join CSI and are at various stages of implementation. These ports are points of passage for approximately two-thirds of cargo containers shipped to the United States. They include (by container cargo volume): Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Rotterdam, Pusan, Bremerhaven, Tokyo, Genoa, Yantian, Antwerp, Nagoya, Le Havre, Hamburg, La Spezia, Felixstowe, Algeciras, Kobe, and Yokohama. CSI consists of four core elements: 1) using intelligence and automated information to identify and target high-risk containers; (2) pre-screening those containers identified as high-risk, at the port of departure, before they arrive at U.S. ports; (3) using detection technology to quickly pre-screen high-risk containers; and (4) using smarter, tamper-evident containers. Globally, more than 48 million full cargo containers move between major seaports each year. Each year, more than 6 million containers arrive in the United States by ship. Most recently, the governments of Malaysia and Sweden have joined CSI. In Europe, CBP is looking to expand CSI to at least 11 additional ports. The CSI initiative supports the "Cooperative G8 Action on Transport Security" adopted by G8 in June 2002.